Secondarily, this allows us to download and retain copies of our favourite shows, even the entire archive, without putting any burden on the pot-tv servers.

There's lots of background and rationale in the threads above, so onto the beta test. I've been downloading the archive over the last few weeks. So far I have about 80Gig, and as a beta test I'm going to start publishing sample torrents in this thread for people to try and comment on.

If you know what you're doing, skip on ahead to the torrents below. Otherwise, you'll want to read up on BitTorrent and get yourself a good client like Azureus and check out some of the popular BitTorrent sites like TorrentSpy etc.

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going to fire some of these up in a few moments and i'll be sure and let you know what sort of results i have ... more than happy to share out some of my bandwidth to seed these things for a time after they're done ... let me know when you put more torrents up, i'll be sure to keep archives of both the shows and the torrents.

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I'll donate 90% of my bandwidth (4Mbit connection) while not using the computer myself.

Edit: Wow, those torrents downloaded *FAST* and with a few more people jumping onboard it's going to be insane. Pot-TV really needs to dig there hands into this technology.. it may not be a replacement, but its a fantastic aid in their cause with little to no additional cost on their part.

Awesome job Niall, I just gave you 5stars for your selfless assistance to spread the seeds of revolution!

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I don't understand BitTorrent yet (when I have an hour of free time to browse the info page, I will! ) but this is such a generous and wonderful way to support us and help spread and share information world-wide.

Thank you Niall! I am SO glad we have your assistance. You're fantastic. Keep up the great work!

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I think the next step is for Pot-TV to supply the torrent links alongside the streamed file links on their site.. then once all the files have torrents, we can start supplying them to other places like torrentspy.com, which will hit a mostlikely UNTAPPED audience.

I'm sure once people start doing searches on torrent spy for "pot" or "marijuana" and see these videos all up for sharing.. we'd even get a number of new members on CC and rally further support for our cause.

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It works really well for me. I would definately watch the all the shows this way if it were available. Does one become a seed if they simply keep bittorrent open after completeing the download?

generally, yes ... though i have seen some clients that allow the user to set various parameters for what happens when a file finishes downloading. myself, i've just been leaving the files seeding since they finished this morning, strangely doesn't seem that many people are hitting me for pieces ... heh.

keep the eps coming, i'll keep grabbing them and seeding out as long as i can ...

So far we've transferred about 2.7Gig (at no cost to pot-tv) of these 7 shows. A total of 42 people have downloaded them, of which 29 are still seeding. If I read this right, we hit 1.63Mbps at peak. I think pot-tv can only stream at about 100-200kbps.

What speeds are people getting from the current seeders?

What we need to do now is open this up to more people and see how this affects the stats. Could people start spreading this thread's URL to other pot-tv viewers?

I'll make my next priority to get the most recent 20 shows up, and maybe we could trial some links on the pot-tv homepage. We really need as many regular viewers using these torrents to see what potential this system has.

After that, if all goes well, then we need a technical contact from pot-tv who we can hand over to, setup an official pot-tv.net tracker so that they can retain statistics themselves, and try to automate the generation of .torrent files as new shows are published. If the budget is tight and there are no technical staff available, I'm happy to help via ssh.

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Great idea, torrents will take a huge strain off the Pot TV servers. Another idea could be to start a usenet group to upload binaries to, say a few a day.

Alot of good usenet servers have long-term retention(http://www.newshosting.com provides 45 day retention) so episodes would not need to be uploaded constantly. I'll get a few uploaded once these torrents are done, and post the group name here

The system is set up to produce a torrent from anything chris uploads to the server (which doesn't work for the shows he's posting lately, since they're from other sites). I consider this an incomplete solution since I haven't been able to get the system seeding all the shows, I haven't seen any good software for seeding 3000+ files at once (reliable and stable).

Where are you downloading the shows from? Are you capturing the data from the stream? What are you using for a tracker? I really like the tracker graphs, what are you using to generate those?

If you want to help integrate the tracker info and the pot-tv site, you can contact me via email tracker 'at' gpster.net

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Yeah *ALL* shows on torrents will be a problem.. as that's just too many shows. Most people if they cared to, would probably only seed for 10 files at once (which alone is a lot).

The system could/would work great for newer releases or the most popular videos.. but as for ALL of them, hard to say what to do.

It'd be nice to access the torrent links directly beside the "Realplayer" links on the main site. It's slightly difficult now to figure out which videos are which.. as I personally would rather help seed the files in higher demand.

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Niall, thanks again for your interest, there's been a lot of talk about torrents but not many people have engaged torrents at the tracker level.

Now, the 2.7 gigs transferred via torrent so far would cost pot.tv about $2.70, so we're not saving much yet, but the monthly pot.tv streaming costs are about $1800 (yes, 1.8 terabytes, or 1800 Gb), so there's a lot of potential to save money on bandwidth and spend it on new show production.

The issue raised about the file naming conventions is a good one. For historical reasons, there isn't a strict naming convention for shows that doesn't really correspond to the show series, title or pot-tv show number. On the media.pot.tv:6969 tracker, you'll see the files have their original filenames, which don't correspond to the show listing and don't tell much about what show it is or where it comes from. I can cross reference them no problem in the database, but that doesn't help as much with shows "in the wild", like on your computer or if they make their way to other trackers.

As far as linking the torrents into their pot-tv show pages, I've tried this with the media.pot.tv tracker. Unfortunately that's not much good if the shows aren't being seeded, and like I mentioned earlier, reliably seeding 3000 shows is tricky. I've tried using btlaunchmany, but so far without much success. There is also a new solution called "osprey" (with permaseed), but I haven't managed to get a working install of this yet. Ideally the torrents linked to the pot.tv show pages would show the seed/leech activity of each torrent. For this it would be best to have a tracker that stores this activity data in a mysql database, but the one we've set up uses some other data storage. We could scrape the tracker for this info, but it would be much nicer to have direct access to the data. So I'm interested to hear about experiences with other trackers that we can run on our linux boxes.

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Karlis, I think if you and Niall got together you would easily solve the problems.. the two of you are way beyond my knowledge of torrents.

From my perspective, like you mentioned already.. the sooner a system of naming can be instituted the better. Show name+date released would be ideal. Infact, it may be ideal (though extremely tedious) to rename the old shows now rather than leave them as be.. it'll mix things up, but at least we can all start on a fresh clean and SAME page.

Also.. the 3000 video files is a dramatic number.. for myself, I would willing to help seed every new video that's released for about a month, or so I seed around 10 torrents at a time.

As for bandwidth savings, it would be minimal thus far, since really nobody knows about torrents and the system hasn't been refined. The thing before was that when I wanted to watch a video over again, I had to waste bandwidth getting it re-sent to me. If I already have the videos on my system then I won't need to waste your bandwidth to review them. Multiply that experience by hundreds and before long the savings on Pot-tv's end should be dramatic.

Perhaps the long lingering files would only remain in streamed format for those fishing through the archive, but if the first releases of new videos could be distributed throughout torrents, it would take an immediate cut off the bandwidth and stop future re-downloads from those who have the files themselves now.

Anyway, I'm rambling I think.. but this is definitely going great so far!